Salt Spring's first schoolteacher: Black BC history and a legacy of love

This story is a written version of a Capital Daily Podcast episode . You can hit play below and listen, scroll down and read, or followthe text along with the audio.

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There’s a wall on Salt Spring Island in the back of the Harbour House Hotel that tells a story of a man who taught the island’s students without any payment. It’s covered now, hidden behind a facade of wood paneling. There are no plaques or schools bearing his name, but his legacy carries on all the same.

His name was John Craven Jones. He was Salt Spring's first-ever schoolteacher, a fact that still rings out to Silvia Mangue Alene, the president of the BC Black History Awareness Society.

“He was one of my favorite pioneers,” she told the Capital Daily Podcast.

He’s been the subject of folk songs, books, and long forgotten murals. And for generations of Black British Columbians, he's been a source of inspiration. Silvia remembers hearing his story for the first time after moving to Victoria.

“I grew up in Europe, in Madrid, Spain. And so it was an eye-opener when I learned that there were Black pioneers in BC, you know?”

John came to Salt Spring Island in 1859, eight years before Canada was formed and 12 years before BC would join the country. He was born in North Carolina to Allan Intemperance Jones.

“Allan was a North Carolina blacksmith who bought his whole family out of slavery for the enormous sum of $5,000,” said North Vancouver writer Crawford Kilian. Kilian has covered John’s story as far back as the 1970s; his fourth book, Go Do Some Great Thing, tells the story of BC's Black pioneers.

“There was this mention of this Black settler on Salt Spring Island, who actually taught the other settlers’ kids, “ he recalled. “So I did some more digging and found out that in fact, he was part of a remarkable family.”

John was the second oldest of three brothers who came to BC. His older brother William was the first dentist ever granted a license under the BC Dental Act—his nickname was Painless Jones. Then there’s the family tree that comes after him. His niece Sophia became the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Michigan’s medical school, and his granddaughter went on to teach Jesse Jackson in the 1960s.

In an impressive family, it’s all the more impressive that John still stands out.

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But how was John Craven Jones received at the time?

“Well, at the time, you have to remember that before the Blacks were invited by Sir James Douglas, there were no Black people in Fort Victoria,” Alene told Capital Daily, “So Sir James Douglas [moved] very strategically, because he needed a [substantial] size of people to come and live in Vancouver Island, because otherwise Vancouver Island would belong to United States.

“So he was very smart. And he thought of the Black people that just came out of slavery and they were struggling and they wanted to live decent lives. But the irony of this is that there were people really here on this island, right?"

Alene points out that there were plenty of Indigenous people inhabiting these areas. But the crown didn’t count them among the people who mattered—British subjects who would secure the region against American encroachment northward, which was the source of diplomatic tensions and even a face-off over a pig.

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No salary for a decade, and a dangerous walk

John Craven Jones didn’t earn any pay for 10 years. Eventually, the Salt Spring Islanders took up his cause and they went to the province, basically urging the government to give him a salary. They finally gave him $500 a year, but that was only by 1869.

Per Crawford Kilian, John would spend three days teaching on one end of the island and then walk to another end of the island to spend three days teaching there.

“It was a kind of homeschooling in many cases, because there was nowhere else to get in and out of the rain, I guess. He was teaching a pretty straightforward Orthodox 19th century education, so it was very heavy on things like grammar and Latin. But he did pretty well.

“One of the first school inspectors came by, and he was not so happy about quality of the students. And he said, ‘This man is spending too much time walking back and forth between one end of the island and the other—why doesn’t he just stay in one place, and the kids can come to him?’

“But Salt Spring Island was a tough place in those days, you could be ambushed by a cougar. Jones himself was occasionally beaten up as he was walking from one end of the island to the other. So I think the parents appreciated the fact that Jones was willing to take his chances instead of making their kids take their chances.

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But how did he get by without any pay?

His pupils and their families would take him in and give him room and board as payment for their kids’ education. He had a farm of his own, where he had preempted about 100 acres of land— something many settlers both Black and white came to the island and did.

“What the government did,” Kilian told us, “was to say, ‘if you go in and you essentially stake a claim to a patch of land, and you file it with us, and you stay on that land, and you improve it a certain amount every year for five years, essentially, it’s yours.’ You’ll pay a very nominal fee to own this land.

“And a lot of people took up the government on this. They didn’t always stay, but a great many of Black settlers moved to Salt Spring in 1859, 1860, not necessarily because they were dying to be on Salt Spring but because they had come up to British Columbia. They had taken their shot at looking for gold, and they had ended up flat broke.”

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Did Salt Spring have much of a Black population in those days?

Black people were among the first settlers to arrive on Salt Spring Island. They came largely from San Francisco escaping slavery, and discrimination as free people, and settled in and around Ganges harbor. But of course the Island was not empty, even if the government was giving away land on it. It had been home to the WSANEC, Cowichan, and Chemainus First Nations for thousands of years. And so John Craven Jones would have taught a fairly multicultural group of students for its time, with Black and White children alongside Indigenous kids.

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Do any of these schools still exist?

Unfortunately not—one was a log school house built in 1861. Its location is hard to pin down precisely but one map in the Salt Spring Archives has it placed fairly close to where you would find Portlock Park today just a little bit southeast of St. Mary Lake. The other schoolhouse was a shack farther north into what is now Fernwood and was called Begg Settlement then.

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How long did he teach there?

16 years, all told. He finally left in 1875 and went back to the US and settled in Ohio where he met his wife and kept on teaching for a number of years, becoming a principal in his later days.

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A legacy of love and giving

John Craven Jones was a memorable man, but the most memorable thing may be the impact he’s had on people, even more than a century later. Both Alene and Kilian spoke reverentially about him. We asked Alene what is it about his story that left such a mark.

“The fact,” she said, “that you come from a place that is very hostile, and it has mistreated you and your people—because his parents were slaves. And so when you come from that background [...] yet you still have so much love in your heart, you know, and that love is shown through your actions and the way you teach people, the way you treat people, the way you talk to people.”

“I think his legacy was just that he had been a full member of his pioneer community on Saltspring,” Kilian told the podcast. “He had found a specialty where he could serve that community. And he did so for a long time, even without payment, essentially out of the goodness of his heart, and the sense that his neighbors’ kids needed and deserved an education”

“He left a legacy of love,” Alene said, “he left a legacy of teachings. He left a legacy of respect. He left a legacy of resilience. He left a legacy of humanitarianism—because we all are human, and we all want the same love, and peace.”

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You can read more in the Salt Spring Archives, and learn more about John Craven Jones and many other memorable Black BC residents at the BC Black History Awareness Society.

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Podcast adjusted to text version by Cam Welch.